


i remember running to the sea

by meritmut



Series: the blackest skies, the daunting stars [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (it's both), Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Luke Skywalker's Island Getaway For Traumatised Force-Users, in which i can't decide if the Force is a desert or an ocean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 16:45:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6160033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Skywalker is all ghosts, all sadness. He has been emptied out, scraped clean and left hollow as the sea-caves that burrow along the lower cliffs of the island, scoured out by the salt winds and tides that batter the place he has lived out his exile.</p>
  <p>Rey does not know the man he was, but she knows something of isolation, and of what it is to be empty.</p>
</blockquote><p>Or, Rey finds her island.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i remember running to the sea

**Author's Note:**

> _i remember running to the sea, alone and blinded by the fear_  
>  i remember running to the sea; remember falling to my knees  
> and the river grows inside of me

For nights and nights, when she lays her head down to rest, she dreams.

She's alone in the wood, bracketed by the shadows lying thick as the snow upon the uneven ground. Faint tremors rock the earth beneath her feet and in the distance she hears the rumbling of thunder, but the flicker of red in the clouds is like no lightning storm she's ever seen.

No storm at all—the light is _fire_ , or fire's ghost, the echoes of earthly flames thrown up into the night sky as though it were some impossible star she stood upon, a winter sun made incalescent by the engines of its own annihilation.

She walks quickly now, ducking under broken branches and darting between the trees as she goes and keeping the heat of the fires at her back. There's no path or track to follow through the frozen wood; only the unshakeable impulse to keep moving and put as much distance as she can between herself and the inferno.

It's a foolish thought. The planet is _dying_ , burning from the inside out. Soon there will be nowhere left to run.

The trees throw bars of shadow across the snow, thicken in the waning light, and Rey knows with the intuitive certainty of the dreamer that this is a path her feet have trodden before.

(She's set foot in only two forests in her short life, gone to war in both. It's not the sort of thing you forget.)

Something cold against her palm; her fingers close about a silver hilt. Her other hand makes a fist against her thigh.

She feels him before she sees him, the hairs at the back of her neck rising like hackles at the new presence on the edge of her consciousness—whether through the Force or some animal instinct, she isn't certain, couldn't care less for the distinction. She's put her faith in this innate voiceless sense all her life without knowing it for what it is, and the Force is not the kind of power you can master with a name.

(She's put that faith in other places too, places she learnt too late had not deserved it, but never at the urging of the nudging _feeling_ inside her, that tripwire-hum deep in her marrow that has led her many places but never yet led her wrong. Even knowing, as she now does, that it's more than mere scavenger's knack, she trusts it as she trusts anything. Any _one_.)

Across the clearing, the shadows shift.

There's something there, coiling in their depths, though to Rey's inchoate awareness it's more of an _absence_ —an emptiness, a gnawing _lack of_ that warps the world around it like gravity, massless and hungering. She is new to this but she can _feel_ the resistance her mind meets where it touches that un-thing, where the darkness pushes back against the onslaught of the light.

She picks out the figure moving within the shadows and the air leaves her lungs in a rush.

He takes shape in pieces—in the glance of reddened light over metal, fire slanting across the surface of that pitiless visor, in the crude coalescence of fury and fear that comprise him and the terrible lack of anything resembling _life_ at his heart. He is a wraith, a spook, an ever-enclosing concentrism of shadows, and when he moves out into the open Rey feels her blood run cold.

The helmet is cracked, rent from jaw to brow in a blackened fissure. The dark garb of his order, the robe and cowled cape are the same, his surcoat torn where the bowcaster made a smoking ruin of his side.

A dark form, patched together from things darker still, cut from blacker stuff than the night itself. He reaches up and the broken helm falls like thunder to the snow.

The eyes are the blackest part of him by leagues. They watch, steadily, as Rey steps back to bring the blue lightsaber's beam up between them.

 _I cut you open,_ she tells him, more to remind herself of it than anything. She doesn't dare take her eyes off him. _I cut you down._

 _You did,_ he agrees, mouth unmoving, and she watches in horror as the flesh of his face begins to split open as though parted by some invisible blade. _Her_ blade, her hand: the ripe scarlet licking its way across his features forms the cruel stripe of the monstrous wound she'd given him, vivid against the pallor of his skin, more blood than she remembers from that awful moment seeping from the strike that clear bisects his face. He does not seem to feel it, holding her in the grip of that malevolent stare.

He lifts an arm and extends one hand toward her, something dark and bright pooling on his palm to slide from his skin like grisly rain.

The ground shifts again—her gaze drops to the scuffed snow between them and there is colour blooming there in the white, redder than red and brilliant as jewels in the glow of that terrible blade, more vital than anything on this sunless world. Rey is struck by the sudden vision of flowers springing up through the snow, of things raw and red where his lifeblood spills upon the earth, slick like shining vines that burst forth from the ground to leech across the space between them, towards her, until they reach her feet and she watches with renewed revulsion as they begin to _climb_.

Another boom rends the air, heat crawling over her cheeks.

 _R'iia_ , she thinks dumbly, implausibly, _come to fetch me home._ And— _the Teedos were right after all._

There are flowers in the sky now too, vivid as the death of stars and the hot flutter of the pulse in her wrists, and the vines climb higher over her boots, her knees, her thighs, burrowing through cloth and skin and bone between her ribs to take root in the bloodiest chamber of her heart and she is _rooted_ to the snow, trapped where she stands and reminded with an acute terror of the moment on Takodana when he'd done naught but raise his hand and she was frozen.

The ground gives a lurch beneath her, pressed up from below. Rey looks down again in time to witness the violent tremor that tears through the earth as the planet's surface opens into fire beneath her feet.

_Oh—_

He watches opaquely as she loses her footing, as she _falls_ , frantic hands grasping at the air and a cry tearing loose from her throat before the world goes hot and dark and Rey wakes with bile in her mouth and a heart hammering fit to burst, the echo of a plea on her lips and the memory of flame and bloody light against her eyelids.

 

 

-

_It's not real_ , she summons the words that have of late become her anchor, slings her legs over the edge of the cot and takes up her staff in one hand, making her way outside into the cold grey light of an island dawn. _It's not real._

The durasteel in her hand is real, the ground beneath her feet and the silvering sky overhead and the unquiet sea that surrounds her; the rocks, the birds and the damp morning air in her lungs. _These things are real. What you can see, feel, now...this is real._

The Falcon is real. Chewie had departed on the second morning but the memory of the old ship has become as much of a refuge to Rey as the fallen Walker in whose bones her younger self had taken shelter, the cramped wreck in the desert that had until only a few weeks ago been _home_.

She finds it in her mind now, leaning on her staff and retreating into herself in a familiar pattern of thought and recollection. Following the path from the gangway to the cockpit, she traces each step until she settles into the pilot's seat and rests her fingers on the dashboard, running through pre-flight checks again and again until her heart rate has slowed and breathing comes a little easier.

Part meditation, part game, it's a trick she learnt from Poe back on D'Qar.

 

 

-

He shares it with her one night over Finn's bedside, the two of them having met there often enough in the small hours to figure out between them that a grievously-injured friend isn't the only thing they have in common. The nightmares, the waking terrors, the gripping fear of being alone with their thoughts—or worse, of _not_ being alone—when the time comes to sleep and the dreams are a little too close to real.

It's no small thing, having another run roughshod and cruel through what should be an inviolate place, and these two are a perfect pair in the ways they hide their suffering.

He goes inward, goes quiet, makes himself small and hopes Finn's waking will help. He doesn't know what else might.

Rey—Rey wears her pain close to her skin, but she learnt earlier than most to keep anything that is not strength tucked away behind what is, and she is still a stranger here.

She unsettles a few with her unabashed stare and her endless, voracious curiosity and the whispers that cling to her like static as the aftermath of the battle unfolds and the Resistance counts the cost. Still too much of an unknown quantity to be questioned, her skittish withdrawal from the organised chaos of the base could easily be a solitary hunter acclimatising to a new world—to the bustle and urgency of war.

It isn't, but it could be, and who is to know better?

(Who but Finn, who sleeps.)

No one, until one night Poe looks outward long enough to observe his own pain reflected in the eyes across from him.

General Organa has been heard to say that more than he is courageous or intrepid, Commander Dameron is kind. The unassailable impulse toward compassion is what keeps him looking out.

 _There's something—seems to work sometimes_ , he begins, dry mouth and icy palms, and Rey turns attentive at once.

He uses a technique from battle, explains Poe, to still his mind to the terrors. To clear his head and centre himself he imagines himself at _Black One's_ controls, executing the drills and manoeuvres he can perform with his eyes shut, and it mightn't sound like much but until the Resistance starts offering rehab for their niche brand of trauma it's about the sum of what they've got.

Rey cracks a smile at that, her gaze already the livelier.

She picks up the habit with a deftness that speaks of her scavenger nature, and an urgency that points more to desperation.

 

 

-

_You don't sleep._

He is tired, so tired, this man she has travelled the galaxy to meet. So grave. And, he sees so _much_.

_I don't sleep._

In the face of it there is little point in hiding.

_And when I do, I dream._

_Always?_

_Yes. Always._

His shoulders draw back and down again in a motion so weary her heart breaks, another piece falling away and—she hadn't thought of her heart as something that could _ache_. Grief and fury and frustration have always sat so squarely in her gut, an uncomplicated collection of base longings. Animal things, felt in animal ways. She feels everything so differently now, wears hurts in new places, and she is unsure whether she likes it.

(Still she is resolved to bear it. Love and sorrow are each other's sharpest edge, she is learning, and if having one means chancing the other she will do it.)

 _I have—I have ways, though. Things I do, to settle my mind. To remind me of what's real._ She won't be a burden, whatever he sees when he looks at her—whichever hurts she has dug up from the dark earth of him with her careless hands. She will carry her own, as she always has, and maybe she will help ease the weight of the years from around his neck too.

(How much they must have weighed, soaked through with the memories of all he's seen.)

He half-smiles at that. _I'm glad to hear it. Perhaps you'll share them with me sometime. We can trade tips._

Luke Skywalker is all ghosts, all sadness. He has been emptied out, scraped clean and left hollow as the sea-caves that burrow along the lower cliffs of the island, scoured out by the salt winds and tides that batter the place he has lived out his exile.

Rey does not know the man he was, tries to imagine him younger both in years and trials and feels another crack somewhere below her sternum.

So much on his shoulders, she senses, and here she is with more for him to carry. She's brought the General's anguish with her, and all the simmerings of frustration and fear picked up like lint in her pockets as she moved among the recuperating Resistance forces, but knowing that he's passed the years with only seabirds for company makes it hard to hold onto them.

She knows something of isolation, and of what it is to be empty. She remembers, and she marvels that he would choose this for himself.

(Recoils from the thought that it must have seemed the kinder fate than what he'd left behind.)

 

 

-

 

They do trade tips, because the memory game is only how you get back—only a way to peel away the fog of the terrors and put solid ground beneath your feet again.

(Any desert-dweller with half their wits grows up knowing to fear the sinking sands. Rey'd never let herself count how many people she's watched struggle to escape from the sucking pits, people she's grappled to save or given up to the sand and _let die_ and it's like that, yanking her limbs out of the nightmares, choosing by instinct alone what to cling to and what to let go.)

It does nothing to pass the hours once you're awake and shaking and sure as nothing else that you'll never sleep again, and to that end Luke turns out to be full of suggestions.

She's fairly sure she isn't imagining how his insistence on the virtues of a good night's sleep sounds more like wishful thinking than an admonition: she mightn't remember the last time she managed one, but it seems now at least she's in company.

(One night she finds him making breakfast beneath a wildfire of starlight, and the circles beneath his eyes betray his smile when she joins him but it's not her place, _not yet_ , to ask.)

On the third evening he brings her down to the blue-grey shore and the caves that sit above the high tide mark, and introduces her to the wrecked old starfighter stowed in the shelter of the crags.

_I don't tinker with her so much anymore, but you're more than welcome to. Or—even just to come and keep the old thing company._

_She's in need of a little care and these bones don't get me around as they used to, but any time, Rey. Day or night._

_Come down, when you can't sleep, or you don't feel like talking ghosts with an old man._

She hadn't, until now. She hadn't wanted to discuss the dreams before, or the fine array of aches and pains in her bones that she _knows_ are no wounds of hers, but here in what seems like the cradle of the universe it suddenly all feels a lot closer to spilling out.

Here, enveloped by sand and stone with no one to hear her but the old man and the ocean and the luminous expanse of stars overhead, the gentle storm of the Force in her veins connecting her mind and soul to every living thing for miles, Rey imagines there is nothing she can say that might disturb this stadium of eternity.

She feels greater peace here than she has known in a long time, and though the words come haltingly when at length she begins to speak the Force laps encouragingly at her ankles and even when she stumbles there's no sense of _hurry_ , no rush to get this out because time itself is sluggish here, unspooling in hours and moments, grains of sand draining through cupped hands, languid as the white-edged ebb of the surf along the shore.

Still, she falters when she gets to _him_ , and all the attendant horror that comes with thinking of that day, and this silence is the hardest to fill. She's not superstitious; doesn't believe uttering his name will summon him like a spectre, but she doesn't want to bring anything of him to this place.

 _Not to me_ , suggests Luke. _Give it to the water._

_Give it up and accept what it gives back._

The sea is a good listener, Rey learns, the wide unbroken blue of the horizon a desert of its own kind. It becomes her constant, the lap of the waves along the shore a fixed point to which her breathing, her heartbeat, the current of the Force through her body seem to align themselves, converging in effortless harmony with the music of all things.

(Steadiness, patience, depthless wells of power she can only imagine. There's a lot of it in Luke.)

She dreams less often after that, but no less intensely, and Luke doesn't begrudge her the nights she chooses the sea or the starfighter over his company. In turn, she doesn't ask how many have seen him fleeing the ghosts that haunt him even in his dreams—though whether it's consideration that bids her bite her tongue, or something more selfish, she doesn't know.

Tinkering with the ruined old X-wing keeps her hands and her mind occupied, and the hours she spends down in the caves cataloguing and attempting to repair the damage from the crash that stranded Luke leave her somewhere far closer to serenity than those she spends in her cell, curled into herself on her pallet begging of no one that tonight will be different—that she'll close her eyes and find nothing there waiting for her in the darkness. That her pain will be her own, and not the echo of another's. Luke might resent her presence here but he won't— _can't_ —begrudge her that.

_Weep, Rey. A little more salt won't hurt the sea. We are grains of sand atop dunes, here. This place will bear your weight._

But there are cracks in her, and she hadn't even known it till she stood by the shore with the universe at her fingertips and the slow tug of the tide drawing the hurts from inside her like poison from a wound. The Force is _so_ strong here, moving through and around the island all the time, rising like the sun over the cliffs and it is _strange_ to have never been without something and yet only now know it.

Its thrum in her mind is a heady thing, chasing the clinging remnants of the dream from her memory as dawn's silvered edge puts the night to flight.

_This is real._

Reaching out, Rey moves through the galaxy like she's part of it (only not _like:_ she is, made of it and part of it and one with it, this is not the belonging she ever sought but it is still a new feeling, to be chosen, to be _wanted,_ and with all the stars in the wild dawn sky calling out _mine_ she might soon forget what it ever was to feel lonely, all her hungers and aches given over to this thing that is bigger than her and yet would keep her for its own), searching the wilderness of the Force the way she'd once scoured the desert for its treasures, surefooted with the knowledge she could lose herself out there and never be lost.

She looks for the dim and distant lights of her friends across the galaxy, safe and strong and only waiting for her to find them again.

And—closer, she finds Luke. He walks down by the water, a steady glow on the nearest edge of her awareness.

She closes her eyes again and goes still, willing her mind into quiescence. Slowly, gradually, the tension slides from her shoulders and she becomes mindful of more immediate sensations—the stirring of hunger in her belly, the whisper of the waves, the faint flushing warmth of sunlight on her cheeks, and woven through it all the bright shining thread of the Force.

 _These things are real. You're where you're meant to be. You're home._ She opens her eyes with a smile, the last dregs of unrest in her spirit sloughing away like so much sand. Her hands curl about her staff as she takes in the sunrise, welcomes its touch on her skin.

The universe moves through her, and everywhere the sea is flowing in.

**Author's Note:**

> 'rey doesn't hold any spiritual beliefs' - rucka
> 
> 'sounds fake' - me, striking susanne sundfør off the list of Things It's Fine To Listen To While Thinking About Star Wars


End file.
